"Blindness separates us from things but deafness separates us from people"   Helen Keller

Children with hearing impairment have the right to live full and productive lives in the same way as other normal children, but their disability may raise a wall around them hindering their communication and socialization with the normal hearing population in the society. This lack of communication with the society leads to isolation which can reduce the potentials of the child to a great degree. Since auditory perception skill plays an inevitable role in the language learning process of a child, any difficulty with an auditory perception which in turn is reflected in the expressive and receptive language of the child. Even when fitted with amplification devices, lack of adequate and appropriate auditory training may make the child dependent on lip reading and other visual cues for communication. This will have serious consequences on the schooling and academic performance of the child.

Thus the hearing impaired children need support to jump over the hurdles of communication barrier and to rise to the mainstream. NISH had already taken an initial step for early detection and intervention for children with hearing impairment several years back. As a new venture, NISH has started a group therapy program “LISTENING UNIT” for school going children with hearing impairment. Running successfully for about a year, this group therapy focusses on two areas; auditory perception and speech production. Starting from simple phoneme level to complex sentence level, this group therapy is also designed to teach suprasegmental aspects and linguistic processing skills to the child.

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